| Économie monde | Braudel borrowed this term too from Wagemann, who wrote of a Weltwirtschaft. It appears in the Mediterranean, but plays a grander role in Civilization and Capitalism. It is ususally translated as ‘world economy’, but this may give a misleading impression of an ecomony that stretches all over the world. The phrase, often used in the plural, might be rendered as ‘economic worlds’. |
| Ethnohistoire | A false friend. What the English-speaking world calls ‘anthropology’ is often described in French as ethnologie. Consequently, ethnohistoire means ‘historical anthropology’ (which it might be more exact to call ‘anthropological history’) rather than ‘ethnohistory’ in the American sense of the history of non-literate peoples. |
| Histoire événementielle | A dismissive term for the history of events, launched by Braudel in the preface to his Mediterranean, but already used by Paul Lacombe in 1915 (while the idea goes back further still, to Simiand, Durkheim and indeed to the eighteenth century). |
| Histoire globale | Yet another false friend, which should not be translated as ‘global history’. As Braudel put it: ‘Globality is not the claim to write a complete history of the world [histoire totale du monde] … it is simply the desire, when one confronts a problem, to go systematically beyond its limits’. Thus Braudel himself studied his sea in the context of a ‘greater Mediterranean’, stretching from the Sahara to the Atlantic. The term ‘globale’ seems to have been borrowed from the sociology of Georges Gurvitch. Cf. histoire totale. |
| Histoire immobile | This phrase is sometimes translated ‘motionless history’ or ‘history that stands still’, a phrase used in 1973 by Le Roy Ladurie in a limited context in a lecture about the ecosystem of early modern France, a lecture that was attacked as if the speaker had denied the existence of change in history. Braudel had already written of une histoire quasi immobile in the preface to his Mediterranean. |
| Histoire-problème | ‘Problem-oriented history’ was a slogan of Lucien Febvre's, who believed that all historical writing should take this form. |
| Histoire quantitative | Another false friend, since the term often refers in French not to quantitative history in general but to macroeconomic history, the history of the Gross National Product in the past. One kind of quantitative history is known in French as histoire sérielle. |
| Histoire sérielle | A term employed by Chaunu in 1960, and rapidly taken up by Braudel and others, to refer to the analysis of trends over the longue durée by means of the study of continuities and discontinuities within a series of relatively homogeneous data (wheat prices, dates of wine harvests, annual births, Easter communicants, etc.). |
| Histoire totale | Febvre liked to speak of histoire tout court, as opposed to economic or social or political history. R. H. Tawney, in 1932, used the term histoire intégrale, perhaps on a French model. However, the anthropologist Marcel Mauss liked to use the adjective totale to characterize the approach of his discipline, while Bloch praised Pirenne's work in 1932 as histoire totale because it revealed the links between different domains of activity. Braudel made the term famous by employing it in the conclusion to the second edition of his Mediterranean and elsewhere. See also histoire globale. |
| Imaginaire social | This term, employed, for example, by Duby, Le Goff and Corbin in the 1970s, more or less replaces mentalités and représentations collectives. The latter term had Durkheimian associations, while the ‘imaginary’ has neo-Marxist ones. It seems to have been taken from C. Castoriadis, L'institution imaginaire de la société (1975), a study that was indebted in its turn to Althusser's celebrated definition of ideology in terms of an ‘imagined relationship to real conditions of existence’. |
| Longue durée | This phrase became a technical term after its employment by Braudel in a famous article of 1958. A similar conception underlies his Mediterranean, but in that book he wrote of une histoire quasi immobile (for the very long term) and une histoire lentement rythmée (for changes over a mere century or two). |
| Mentalité | Although Durkheim and Mauss had employed it on occasion, it was Lévy-Bruhl's La mentalité primitive (1922) that launched this term in France. Despite his interest in Lévy-Bruhl, Marc Bloch preferred to describe his Royal Touch (1924), now recognized as a pioneering study of mentalities, as a history of représentations collectives (a phrase favoured by Durkheim), représentations mentales or even illusions collectives. In the 1930s, Febvre introduced the term outillage mental, but it did not have great success. It was actually Georges Lefebvre, a historian on the edge of the Annales group, who launched the phrase histoire des mentalités collectives. |
| Nouvelle histoire | This phrase was popularized by the book La nouvelle histoire edited by Jacques Le Goff and others in 1974, but this claim for Annales had been made earlier. Indeed, Henri Berr had written about la nouvelle histoire in 1919, ten years before the foundation of the journal. Braudel spoke of une histoire nouvelle in his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France in 1950, while Febvre used phrases like ‘another kind of history’ (une autre histoire) to describe what the Annales group were trying to do. |
| Outillage mental, see mentalité. | |
| Psychologie historique | The phrase was used by Henri Berr in 1900 when formulating the aim of his newly founded Revue de Synthèse Historique. Bloch described his Royal Touch (1924) as a contribution to la psychologie religieuse, and some of his later essays on responses to technological change as contributions to la psychologie collective. Febvre pleaded for la psychologie historique in an article of 1938, published in the Encyclopédie française, and he described his study of Rabelais in the same terms. Robert Mandrou subtitled his Introduction à la France moderne, based on the notes left by Febvre and published in a series founded by Berr, as an essay in psychologie historique. In the competition with mentalités, and later with imaginaire social, this term has been the loser. |
| Réseau | A network. The term was used by Maurice and Denys Lombard in economic contexts, and by Bernard Lepetit in his studies of urban history. |
| Structure | Febvre employed the term ‘structure’ on occasion, but he was also somewhat suspicious of it. Braudel made little use of the word in his Mediterranean, in which what we might call the structural sections are described as le part du milieu and destins collectifs. It seems to have been Chaunu who launched the term structure, which he defined as ‘everything in a society or an economy that lasts sufficiently long for its movement to escape the ordinary observer’. |